


Help Me Close My Eyes

by nightlibrary



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 00:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightlibrary/pseuds/nightlibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All their laughs sound watery. Stiles figures that was Lydia’s goal, more than this tear-soaked heart-to-heart on the carpet of her bedroom. Get drunk, forget the heavy things, laugh at stupid jokes, pass out into dreamless sleep. A noble, brilliant plan that was unfortunately bested by their brand new inclination to fits of melancholy. When did everything get so fucked up? Aren’t teenagers supposed to get drunk and bounce back? Isn’t it, like, some sign of horrible adulthood if you’re sitting around crying and talking about the past when you’re smashed?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Help Me Close My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably really ridiculous and weird, but it's what I needed to do following this week's episode. Don't read if you haven't watched--I don't want you to get spoiled. This is entirely unbeta'd, and I haven't read through it because I just finished and I have to shower before work, but. Yeah. This is for Liri, who is both the angel and the devil on my shoulder. I love you, you loser <3

Stiles and Lydia are lying in the center of Lydia’s bedroom floor, spread starfish-like on the carpet, Lydia’s ankles resting up beside Stiles’ ear. They’re staring at the ceiling. Scattered over a tiny area is a collection of glow-in-the-dark stars, and Stiles can’t stop staring at them.

“Kind of tacky,” he says. Lydia just hums. “I mean the stars. Not very you.”

“Bet you have some,” she jabs back, but it’s slow. A sword made of wood rather than steel.

“Yeah,” Stiles replies, and he shrugs. “But I also have, like, an abacus and the first thousand piece puzzle I ever finished hanging up on my wall. I’m that guy. You--like, what, you had them when you were twelve and they were still cool, and then you forgot about them?”

“No.”

They’re silent for a second, Lydia’s last word falling down over them like fresh snow, or dust. Stiles thinks he can feel the stubborn sound of her on his skin, a physical thing: strong despite everything.

Lydia’s voice when she speaks again is very soft. “I kept them on purpose.”

Stiles sits up so fast that his head spins--or maybe it’s slow, and his head spins anyway. Sat beside the bed is a large and mostly empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot. It’s possible Stiles is a little drunk. Lydia doesn’t look at him.

“What?” he says blankly. She lifts a hand.

“I wanted them. I--do you know,” she says, and her voice is still soft and slow as bubbles growing, “that the first man to discover champagne was a monk named Dom Perignon, and when he tasted what he’d created, he called out to the others, ‘Gentlemen, come quickly! I am tasting stars!’?”

Stiles’ hand seems to move of its own accord. His fingers wrap gently over the flute of Lydia’s ankle, as delicate to the touch as it looks in her heels, sloping down into a tiny foot with purple painted nails. She curls her toes and he watches, unable to look at her face.

“Stars, huh?” Why does he feel like he’s going to cry?

“They’re so far away that we can hardly understand them. They’re born to die, and we see it happen years and years before we can ever reach them. They’re beautiful, but--,” she cuts off, and her hand falls to cover her face. There’s a beat, and then--

“Lydia, are you crying?”

A muffled sob. “No.”

Stiles strokes his thumb over Lydia’s ankle. His hand is the only part of his body that doesn’t feel frozen. His voice is tight. “Lydia?” Her hair is fanned out around her head like a brilliant orange halo, and if she were to lie still enough, and he were to see as a star might, she’d look like a painting. A madonna. Pale, gorgeous. Weeping.

“Stiles, everyone dies. I can feel them, and--I find them, and they’re dead. They’re already dead.”

Stiles can feel tears on his face. He doesn’t know why or how, but he’s crying. Sympathy? His throat aches like someones got a hand to it, squeezing tighter the longer he does nothing but look. He tries to speak.

“Lydia.” His voice is a whisper. He wants to hold more of her, crush her into his body until she can’t cry anymore--until neither of them can cry anymore, until they’re nothing but dust. Something in Stiles feels capable of that. Maybe it’s the weight in his chest. Maybe it will do the job for him.

“Stiles, what if someone else--what if--,” and then she’s sobbing, curling over, and Stiles surges forward, his body a wave or a blanket unfolding over her, drawing her in and under. He pulls her in close as he can, her hair silk beneath his chin, both of them sitting up beneath her stars.

“He won’t,” Stiles says, and his voice breaks, white foam on the edge of the beach, the crash he keeps feeling over and over. His bones throb like phantom limbs. When he wasn’t looking, his insides could have been hollowed out--vital parts of him, lost like loose change. It feels like the norm. Like more than the norm. “I’m not worth that.”

“Stiles.” Lydia’s voice is full of more than tears. “You’re worth--what are you talking about?”

He pushes his fingers into Lydia’s skin like he wants to get lost there--too tight, he knows, and so he lets go, little by little, trying to breathe. The air tastes like sorrow, and Stiles knows it for sure because he knows what sorrow tastes like. Accidental sleep, the grit of black coffee, the same tepid water that’s been sitting beside your father’s bed for three days because he hasn’t drunk it, though you’ve brought it to him because you know he needs it and he must be thirsty. On the fourth day a gulp is missing and you cry. You keep crying until he gets up, and he doesn’t ask if you’re crying because you’re sad or happy or relieved. He knows why you’re crying.

You’re crying because she’s dead.

“Do you know what I said?”

“When?” Lydia’s hands are resting at the base of his spine, her arms looped around his body, legs splayed to one side. The both of them are half on their knees. He wants to pull her closer. Get her legs around him, feel her solid and warm, holding him to the earth. His head is lighter than even champagne could make it, as empty as the rest of him, nothing but a single phrase sitting in the center of a well lit room, the most important exhibit in the museum of reasons that Lydia, this time, is wrong.

“The last thing I said to him.” Stiles can feel Lydia shaking her head, and before she can speak, the words slip free.

“I told him that--that mom would have believed me. About werewolves, all of it. I tried to tell him and--I said that, I said. Mom would have believed me.”

“Oh, Stiles.” It’s barely louder than a breath. “Stiles, you didn’t mean it.”

“I did.” Tears are leaking out of the crack in Stiles’ voice. He has the stray thought that they’re going to get Lydia’s hair wet, and he should move, but then she’s shifting in his arms, pulling back and swinging her legs around. Without stopping to ask, Lydia knows what he needs. She wraps her whole body around his, sat in his lap now, face buried in the juncture between his neck and shoulder.

“Maybe. But Stiles, you were upset. If all of us were always held responsible for everything we said under emotional duress, and no one ever forgave us? I think there’d be a lot more homicides.”

“Population of Beacon Hills: zero,” he jokes, and Lydia laughs. It’s weak but it’s there.

“Same Stiles,” she murmurs, more to herself than him. Then, serious, “It won’t be the last thing you say. It won’t.”

He breathes deep. “Can you know that?”

Maybe he shouldn’t ask. He doesn’t feel ready to know. What if she can know, and she knows right now, and she’s lying to him to make him feel better? What if Stiles is last to find out, of all things, about his own father’s death? The problem with werewolves--and he’s trying to joke, even inside of his head, every part of him always running from the dark he’s now lost in--was that they made Stiles feel like a child again. The same guilt. The same fear. The same inability to do a damn thing to stop someone slipping through his fingers.

Lydia strokes Stiles’ back once, twice. “No,” she answers, and he tightens his fingers into fists against her spine. “I can’t know that. I’m not psychic, obviously. No automatic writing for me.”

All their laughs sound watery. Stiles figures that was Lydia’s goal, more than this tear-soaked heart-to-heart on the carpet of her bedroom. Get drunk, forget the heavy things, laugh at stupid jokes, pass out into dreamless sleep. A noble, brilliant plan that was unfortunately bested by their brand new inclination to fits of melancholy. When did everything get so fucked up? Aren’t teenagers supposed to get drunk and bounce back? Isn’t it, like, some sign of horrible adulthood if you’re sitting around crying and talking about the past when you’re smashed?

It seems unfair that Stiles should have to shoulder the emotional baggage of an adult while still feeling helpless as the thirteen year old that didn’t know how to make his dad look at him for more than a split second at a time.  All of this seems really fucking unfair.

“Lydia?”

“Mm.”

“Can I--my dad,” he says, and he’s speaking slowly enough to give her space to cut him off, but she doesn’t. So he keeps going. “I always pushed so hard. Have always. And before--,” he pauses to swallow, almost unable to say it, “he--he was taken, I was trying to explain. About werewolves, and everything. Because I thought it was gonna be him, y’know, guardians. I wanted to protect him, and that meant making him understand. Again.”

Lydia makes to pull back, and though Stiles doesn’t try to stop her his body tenses, and she freezes. “Again?” Her voice is very careful.

“I needed him to understand.” His voice sounds more desperate than he wants it to, breathless, tears starting again as he reaches for words. “Not like this, I just--but it’s the same, right? Me pushing so hard, wanting--just wanting to be...,”

“Believed?”

“Trusted. Understood. That sounds so fuc--just--I feel like a teen movie, talking about wanting to be understood, God, but It feels the same. I wanted my mom to understand, too.”

Lydia does pull back now, to look at him. He meets her eyes and doesn’t look away, taking solace in the green of them, bright with tears.

“I feel like they could have been better. Without me. I’m difficult. I talk too much, I--I’m a burden. But that’s not his fault. He tries so hard, Lydia. And I’m--I need him to know that I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’d take it back. If there were anything I could give, if I could take his place. I can’t lose him. It’s my fault, Lydia. I need so much.”

Lydia’s mouth has fallen open. She lifts her hands to cup Stiles’ face, and he squeezes his eyes shut, suddenly unable to keep looking. “Stiles,” she breathes, and his breath hitches.

“My mom--died, Lydia. She gave me everything and it wasn’t enough. I can’t do this to my dad. I can’t.”

“Stiles, look at me. Please. Stiles. This isn’t something you’ve done, do you understand? Your mom was not your fault. Your dad is not your fault. None of this is. You’re good, Stiles,” she whispers, and her thumbs are stroking over his cheekbones, and she’s catching tears as they roll down, seemingly endless. “You’re so good. You’ve helped so much. You’re so brave. Stubborn, annoying, ridiculous. But good and brave.”

“He can’t die, Lydia. What if--it’s not all house fires and ritual sacrifice, but it’s--it can still be more than an accident, right? Like, a punishment, for being wrong. Guilty. Just stupid and fucked--,”

“You’re not stupid, and you’re not fucked up. There isn’t any blood on your hands, Stiles,” Lydia isn’t whispering anymore. Her hands are so soft. “You’re good, okay? You’re good. He’ll be back. You’ll get him back.”

Lydia’s mouth meets his in a whisper of a kiss. He’s barely aware of it except that he is, opening his eyes to see that hers are still open, and he’s going cross-eyed from trying to look but--Lydia’s here. Stiles needs a friend more than anything, and Lydia is here, trying to show him in any way she can that he isn’t what he thinks. He’s better, he’s more. She believes that. Brilliant, snarky, bold, independent, beautiful Lydia believes that. She believes in him.

He closes his eyes and kisses her back.

“You know, I didn’t think it was like you to take advantage of a drunk girl,” she whispers as he’s slipping his hands beneath the edge of her shirt, and he freezes like he’s been shot.

“Oh my God, are we drunk? I don’t--Lydia, if you think--,”

“Stiles, Jesus,” she says, and pulls herself closer, hooking her arms behind his neck. “No. I was joking. You just. Um. You always joke, and it’s freaking me out. Stiles, you know why I did this, right?”

There are a lot of jokes he could make to that, but he doesn’t make them. He sits with his hands pressed to Lydia’s skin and he lets the guilt and the fear and sadness and the horrible, panicked hurt roll over him, out of him. He breathes in the scent of her skin and her shampoo and her champagne-sweet exhale and he sighs.

“To make us feel better,” he says, simply. She nods.

“And you know what always, always makes me feel better?”

It’s ridiculous, is what it is. From crying to grinning in such a short space. “What?”

“Sex,” Lydia says, mock-serious, and Stiles tilts forward to press a kiss to her cheek.

“You get that--um, I’m not--,” and Christ, Stiles can’t stop being honest with her, now, but he needs her to know. Lydia isn’t anyone. He kisses the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah, Stiles, I know. I’m kidding. We don’t have to have sex. But I do want--I’ve been warding you off for long enough, I think. As annoying as the whole, ‘Oh Lydia, you should pay attention to me because I’m in love with you and that means you owe me something, I’m such a nice guy, blah blah blah’ act is--,”

“Hey--,”

She lifts a hand to cover his mouth, eyebrows arched. “It’s gross and boring, Stiles, and we’ll have a chat about that later. But other than that. You’re--,” and her whole face softens a little, hand coming away from his mouth to stroke at his cheek and down to his neck, “You’re the first person to make me feel safe, and not like a freak. Since--,”

“Jackson,” Stiles says, and she nods. He presses his forehead to hers. “You make me feel safe, too. As stupid as that is.”

He can feel Lydia’s smile. “We never really are, are we? But it feels good.”

“Yeah,” he mutters, tracing his fingers over the edge of her jeans, the dimples of her back. “Yeah, it does.”

There’s a handful of silence, just them and their breath as the bedroom gets darker and the stars get brighter--both the ones outside and the ones Lydia’s put up herself and kept, because she liked seeing them, and tasting them, and knowing what it might be like to see herself from far away. A way to keep perspective. Then Lydia’s whispering again.

“Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have to have sex. But we should probably get a little bit more naked.”

Stiles laughs, but he kisses her again, and again. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

It’s the best he’s felt in weeks.

  
  



End file.
